Bench Strength: Which firm has the highest proportionate representation in Chambers Global?

When it comes to law firms, size isn’t everything. Full service doesn’t necessarily mean best service. And variety isn’t always a harbinger of quality.

That’s what Legal Post found when we took a close look at the Chambers Global 2011 rankings. Law firms are fond of emphasizing the number of lawyers in the firm who made the rankings. Fair enough.

But there are some other considerations. Like proportion, which is to say the number of lawyers ranked in Chambers as a proportion of the firm’s total size. And when we did the numbers, we found some disparities between overall firm size, number of Canadian lawyers ranked, and the proportion of Canadian lawyers ranked to overall firm size. The charts reflect our findings.

In arriving at these numbers, we counted lawyers who were ranked in more than one Chambers category only once. And we did not weight our own rankings according to the relative position of a lawyer in one of Chambers’ four “bands.” Our data is current as of the beginning of 2011.

What we discovered is that the firms with the highest proportion of Chambers-ranked lawyers were not Canada’s largest firms.

Goodmans LLP is Canada’s 21st largest firm, but with only 198 lawyers, ranks solidly first on the proportion scale at over 20.7%; Torys LLP, Canada’s 15th largest firm, ranked second with 17.2% of its 256 lawyers on the Chambers list; and Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP, Canada’s 16th largest firm of 240 lawyers, came a close third at 17.1%.

Indeed, of Canada’s 10 largest firms, only four (Osler, Blakes, McCarthy & Stikeman) ranked in the top 10 from a proportional perspective. Otherwise, Canada’s largest firms only constitute six (McCarthy, Blakes, Osler, Stikeman, Borden Ladner, and Faskens) or barely more than half of the top 10 firms by total number of lawyers ranked. Not surprisingly, however, these six firms took six of the top seven places on that list. The one exception was Bennett Jones, which placed sixth.